1. The Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems and methods for monitoring exchanges between a client and a server across a network. More specifically, the present invention relates to systems and methods that read a network monitor trace and rebuild the requests and responses to make the exchanges easily readable to a user by rebuilding entire requests and responses, coalescing chunked information, collecting interleaved packets, reformatting extensible markup language (“XML”) bodies, if present, and optionally removing any hyper-text markup language (“HTML”) bodies from the requests and responses.
2. The Relevant Technology
The Internet protocol known as hyper-text transfer protocol—distributed authoring and versioning (“HTTP/Dav”) is becoming the foundation for application development on exchange server technology, which employs a client/server relationship. The HTTP/Dav protocol uses XML to execute requests and corresponding responses between a client and a server across a network.
The requests and responses pass through a protocol stack in order to be transmitted across the network. To provide a more efficient transmission across the network, it is customary for a protocol stack to dissect the request or response that passes through the stack into fragments. The fragments are then incorporated into blocks of data, known as “packets,” which are in the form of long buffers of bytes. The packets are then individually sent across the network connection. As such, and by way of example, a given request sent by a client to a server across a network can comprise many packets.
While standard Internet protocol ensures that the packets of a specific request or response will be properly ordered once received, all of the packets that correspond to a given request or response are not necessarily transmitted together. Instead, the packets corresponding to a request or response are interleaved with packets that correspond to other requests and/or responses in order to optimize the transmission of data across the network.
To further optimize the transmission of data across the network, the data in the body of the packet is frequently “chunked.” This means that rather than placing the data into a single buffer, the data is strung together. Therefore, by way of example, if a client communicates a 32-kilobyte request to a server, this request may be chunked into one or more segments that are strung together, each segment being transmitted individually to the server.
The requests and responses exchanged between a client and a server are visible to a network monitor. The network monitor, also referred to as a “packet sniffer,” sees the packets that are transmitted across the network, arranges the packets in the order that they were sent, and creates a trace.
While a network monitor trace is valuable for recording the HTTP/Dav activity, it is a very poor tool for analyzing the activity because it understands neither HTTP/Dav protocol nor XML. The trace displays the network packets as a very unfriendly jumble of bytes in what is known as the frame viewer window, which may provide, by way of example, six columns of text (generally in hex) that is six bytes wide and twenty pages deep. The reading of the trace is further complicated when the data is chunked because the data is all strung together. Furthermore, the reading of the trace becomes even more complicated because of the interleaving of the transmitted packets. As such, upon desiring to read the portion of the trace specific to a given request and/or response, a reader easily confuses data that he/she believes corresponds to the given request and/or response with data that corresponds to other requests and/or responses.